Does The Jersey Shore, MTV’s latest pop-cultural sensation, purport to reveal the ways of East Coast “Guidos” and “Guidettes” or the ways of neoliberal economics?
To anyone living outside the northeastern United States, MTV’s The Jersey Shore, the cable network’s latest reality-television offering, is an encounter with the strange and unfamiliar. In my own experience as someone born in the Rust Belt, reared in the Midwest and educated in the Southwest, seldom did I encounter so-called “Guidos” and “Guidettes.” I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with “Guido” stereotypes; they were just rather remote from my experience — until I moved to New England, that is. Here the landscape crawls with Guidos. One can usually find them on the main drag of my neighborhood, leaning on Katana bikes and menacing popped-collared Ivy Leaguers. Or one can find them at the beach, again leaning against said Katana bikes.
Casually observing Guidos while conducting my own life’s business revealed to me nearly nothing about their folkways. MTV’s The Jersey Shore therefore held for me all the exotic appeal of an ethnographic document. Yet I have to say that after having watched the entire season run the show disappointed rather than satisfied my curiosity. The Guido demimonde does have its peculiarities (the impression I got of it is that of traditional family-centered Italian-American culture to which elements of hip-hop culture have been superadded), but these were relatively minor, and ultimately incidental, compared to the actual premise of the show, which seems to be: find people who like to drink, screw and fight; put them in a position to drink, screw and fight; and then film them drinking, screwing and fighting. This premise certainly holds some amusement value, but only so much. In fact, I found myself forgetting that the reason I was watching the show was to glimpse the unique customs of East Coast Guidos and Guidettes, because the incidents and escapades the show’s subjects found themselves in I found immediately — and depressingly — familiar. Read the rest of this entry »
How does one resign himself to existing affairs? What sort of self-deception must he engage in to be able to say to himself, “Truly, my condition is mete and just?” Goethe once wrote, “None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.” I wonder, however, if this maxim admits of its inverse: “None are so hopelessly free as those who falsely believe they are enslaved.” But what possible hopelessness could one possibly find in freedom? Even the mind-bendingly obscure German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel believed that history moved toward the goal of human emancipation, while the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre claimed that freedom ameliorates despair. It does not cause it.
Nothing brings a breezy read to a halt quicker than a gesture to leftist political theory. Beyond a tiny coterie of (mostly tenured academic) partisans, whose livelihood depends on occupying the extreme margin of political discussion, leftist theorists win precious few readers. And with good reason. Their writings are formidably inaccessible, freighted with abstractions and often presuming detailed familiarity with the finer points of some past internecine debate. At a moment (one is tempted to write conjuncture) when time and its corollary, attention, are the scarcest resources of all, leftist political theorists can seem downright profligate, scoffing at economies of expression or communicative action. Tweets their works most definitely are not.
Via Jos Schuurmanns’s 
A favorite pastime of mine involves cuing up on CNN.com the video feed of some major political event. As the video starts rolling, I pull up Calculated Risk’s comment 
As a member of so-called Generation X, I have witnessed in my time the marketing of consumer-ready zeitgeist. I emerged into adulthood right around the time of Seattle’s ascendancy. Grunge, which to me sounded like simplified metal, was pronounced the music of a generation and heralded the end of the hair-rock–synth-pop duopoly.
Zuckerberg Tyrannos: The improbable, baby-faced founder of Facebook — whose first name, for those who have been living in a cave (or, at least without Facebook) the past several years, is Mark — recently 
I spent the holidays out of reach of television, English-language radio, and English-language newspapers. Aside from the rare foray into town, a dial-up internet connection represented my only tether to the wider world, and when that connection proved inoperable my isolation became nearly total.
October, a journal of art criticism, devoted its Fall 2006 
Rob Horning
Ylajali Hansen
Henry Brulard